Could we make beer in space? | Andrew Walsh | TEDxPerth

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

Andrew Walsh combines his professional career in astrochemistry and his passion for brewing beer to compare the molecules found in space and in beer. Ultimately to answer the question of "Can we make beer in space?"

OK, so you're probably looking up
at that title and thinking,

"Why is this guy talking
about two completely unrelated subjects,

beer and Space?"

With that lovely intro,
you probably got an idea

that I have a day job as an astronomer,

and I have a hobby, brewing my own beer.

But it actually goes
quite a bit deeper than that.

It comes down to this character here.

This is my dad.

Once upon a time
when I started off my astronomy career,

my dad said to me,

"So, son, what are you working on?"

I said, "Well, dad, the subject
of my PhD thesis is

The Association
of Ultra-compact H2 Regions

and Methanol Maser Emission."

(Laughter)

As I was saying these words to him,

I could see his eyes were starting
to glaze over,

and he started losing interest
in what I was saying.

Up until I said the word "methanol,"

and his eyes lit up, and he went,

"Ah, methanol, right? That's alcohol,
so you found beer in Space!"

(Laughter)

I said, "Sorry, dad, methanol
is actually a very bad form of alcohol.

It's poisonous to you;
if you drink that stuff,

it can make a bloke go blind,
it can even kill you.

So you don't want
to be drinking that stuff."

Ethanol is the good alcohol

that you find in beer
and other alcoholic drinks.

At that stage, we hadn't
found any out in Space.

So, by this time, my dad had
basically stopped listening to me

and not paying attention
to the conversation any more.

So this talk is some sort
of justification for my dad

and my entire astronomy career.

(Laughter)

So, starting off with this question -

can we make beer in Space? -

let's find out what goes into beer,

and then see
if we can find it out in Space.

So, by far, the most important ingredient
in beer is water,

95% of the volume is water.

Then we have barley
which provides sugars and starches

and also the characteristic
malty flavor of beer.

We have hops which also add
their own little flavor to beer

and give beer its distinctive bitterness.

And we have yeast
which are the single-celled organisms

that do all of the work
of converting the sugars

into ethanol and carbon dioxide.

And that's, ladies and gentlemen,
is pretty much it.

Those are the four ingredients
that you need to make a world-class beer.

Now thinking about going out into Space
and finding these things,

we're actually off to a pretty good start

because there's plenty
of water out in Space.

But from there on
it gets a little bit tricky.

Thinking about yeast for a moment,

it's debatable if we'll be able to find
single-celled organisms out in Space,

but quite unlikely we'll be able
to find the right ones

that can do the job of changing the sugars
into ethanol and carbon dioxide for us.

It gets even more tricky
when we think about the other ingredients.

Are we going to find
hop vines out in Space?

I think it's very unlikely

or even something like fields
of barley out in Space.

No, I don't think so.

However on this last point,

I will mention
that with some circumstantial evidence,

somebody out there
knows something about it.

(Laughter)

So, we've got to look at this
from a different perspective.

Let's look at it
from a chemicals perspective.

See what chemicals are
that go into beer,

and see if we can find those out in Space.

As I said we start off with water,
the most important ingredient,

and then we have alcohols,
in particular, ethanol

which gives you
the characteristic dryness in beer,

but is also the intoxicant
that makes you drunk.

We have carbon dioxide,
the bubbles in beer,

sugars and starches are a major player
in the flavor of beer;

it basically comes down
to this molecule here.

This is the sugar molecule glucose.

The great thing about glucose

is that you can put two
glucose molecules side by side,

link them up and you create
a new sugar called maltose.

Maltose is the main sugar
that you get from barley.

Put another glucose molecule there,
now we've got another sugar, maltotriose.

And you can keep this linking process
going on and on and on

and create very long strands
of glucose molecules.

This is what we call starches.

Moving on, we have proteins

which have what we call
mouthfeel to beer.

So whether a beer has a rich and full body

or whether it's thin and watery

is mainly down to proteins.

We have esters which have
fruity flavors and aromas,

typically find ales have esters
but not so much in lagers.

We have the bittering compounds
that come from the hops

give us the bitterness in beer
as well as some preservative qualities.

In addition to all those groups,
I wanted to mention

four molecules of particular interest
to beer flavor.

The first one is dimethyl sulfide,
or DMS for short.

In very low concentrations, it has
quite a pleasant, sweet smell and flavor,

somewhat reminiscent of cooked corn.

Then we have methyl mercaptan
which again is quite pleasant

in low concentrations.
But in high concentrations,

it's actually is the ingredient
mainly in bad breath and asparagus pee.

(Laughter)

You're probably wondering,

"Why would you want these chemicals
anywhere near a beer?"

They are actually very important
flavor characteristics of beer,

in very low quantities.

But obviously we don't want them
in high quantities,

so any brewer
that's worth their salt,

will know how to very carefully
control these things.

The next one is acetaldehyde

which has an aroma similar
to freshly cut green apples,

or freshly mowed lawn for that matter.

It's actually a molecule
that's produced by the yeast

as it takes the sugars
and converts it into ethanol.

So if you smell this stuff in beer,
it's a typical indicator

that your fermentation
hasn't quite finished yet;

you need to be a little bit more patient.

The last one is diacetyl

which has a pronounced butter
or butterscotch aroma and flavor to it.

It's actually the chemical
that is used to flavor butter popcorn.

In very low concentrations,

it adds a distinctive
sweet, creamy, malty flavor to beer.

But in high concentrations, once again
you don't want this stuff in your beer

because nobody likes
to drink a pint of butter.

So that's the whole lot
that goes into beer.

You can look at this
as a shopping list, if you will.

So now we want to go out in Space
and see if we can find these things.

The first question is where do we look
in Space to find these molecules?

It turns out the best place to look
is within our galaxy at the places

where the biggest stars are being created.

So let me explain a little bit
about that process.

You start off with a cloud of gas and dust

some places within that cloud
are a little bit denser than others.

And those dense bits contract together
under the influence of gravity

to create these well-defined blobs.

Now if you look deep
inside one of these blobs,

you'll find a disc structure like this.

Obviously eventually this is
where the planets will form.

The disc itself is
very dense in the middle,

not so dense on the outside,

and as more and more material
are piling onto the disc

and through the middle
of the disc all the time,

so the center of the disc gets
denser and denser and hotter and hotter

until eventually a star is born.

Now this star itself continues to grow
and gets brighter and hotter.

And it in turn heats up
its surroundings a little bit.

Now sometimes after this,

there is a powerful stellar wind
that turns on around this star,

and it physically pushes
material away from the star.

And this little bubble that's created
very quickly expands,

and it goes right through the disc
right through the surrounding envelope.

until you got nothing left
but just the star sitting there on its own.

This pretty picture here is one
of my favorite regions in the sky

with somewhat subdued name, G305.

(Laughter)

If you're curious to know where G305 sits,

here's a picture of the Southern Cross,

G305 is right down there,

just on the edge of this star patch
that we call the Cossack.

A really good things about G305

is it shows this star formation
process very nicely.

So the starting part of the process,
the Cold Dark Clouds,

this is where you've got
the density coming together

but before any star has formed.

Unfortunately we can't see much
in this particular image

because they're cold and dark.

But one thing says that you get these
little red fuzzy guys like this one here

which is Warm Cloud,

so, now we got a star in the middle,

it's heated up and it's starting
to heat up its surroundings,

but before the powerful
stellar wind turns on.

When that happens, you get
these cute little young bubbles forming.

The one on the left there,
you should be able to see,

is a very small shell-like structure
with a very bright star in the middle.

And of course this picture shows
a very nice example of an old bubble

which is this very large
circular hole here.

Now thinking about the chemistry,
how does that fit into this process?

When in the earliest stages
with the Cold Dark Clouds,

the chemistry is very very simple
and somewhat boring.

But where all the action is
is when you have the Warm Clouds

because the extra bit of heat
allows chemical reactions to proceed

and it gets a whole lot more interesting.

By the time the stellar winds turn on,
things get a little bit boring again

because these winds effectively destroy
all the complex molecules.

If you look in these earliest stages,

these are the most common molecules
that you'll find out there;

quite simple 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 atoms.

But what you'll see in the middle there

is two of the molecules
that we need for beer:

we've got water and carbon dioxide,

So we can make fizzy water.

When we go to the Warm Cloud phase,
then it gets quite a bit more interesting,

a little bit more organic
and larger chemicals.

And again in the middle here,
we've got two of the molecules we need.

We've got the green apples
and we've got asparagus pee.

(Laughter)

If you're wondering how we find
these molecules out in Space,

we use a radio telescope like this:
this is the Mopra Radio Telescope.

It lives in New South Wales, but
a really cool thing about this telescope

is that I can sit
in my office here in Perth

and can control this thing
directly over the Internet.

Anyway, a radio telescope operates
on a similar principle

to the radio in your car
except that we don't have a tuning knob,

so you can't pick out a specific frequency
for specific radio station.

In fact you get all frequencies
in a spectrum like this.

So all those peaks that you see there

are kind of like radio stations
at specific frequencies,

but instead of being radio stations,
they come from molecules in Space.

If you know the frequencies
of the molecules

from doing experiments on Earth,
then you can match up the frequencies

you see them in Space
and identify these peaks.

If you look very closely
at these identifications,

the second-in from the left
and the second-in from the right,

you'll see EtOh which is shorthand
for ethanol, that's the good alcohol,

so we got alcohol out of Space.

Here's an entire list of all the molecules
that we know about out in Space,

as of a few weeks ago,
there're a bit over 170 of them.

The ones in white there
are all the ones that we find in beer.

So there's a good overlap
between the two of them.

So, let's go back to our shopping list
and see which ones we can tick off.

As I said all along,
there's plenty of water out in Space.

If you look at just one
of these Warm Clouds,

and put all of the water together,
there would be enough water

to fill up the volume
of a full planet, the size of Jupiter.

So plenty out there.

And ethanol, yes, we have ethanols,
I've shown you, how much?

A lot of ethanol out in Space.

Again, average Warm Cloud
just one of these guys,

take all of that ethanol, make
a standard-strength beer out of it,

there'll be enough beer
to fill up the Swan River with beer,

20 times over, for each
and every individual on the planet.

(Laughter)

So we are not going
to run out of this stuff.

(Laughter)

There's a lot of carbon dioxide
out in Space as well,

and we do see sugars out in Space.

We have this glycolaldehyde,
but as I said the important one in beer

is glucose which we haven't seen yet.

Unfortunately we don't have any
in the groups of proteins, esters

or bittering compounds.

Simplistically put, this is
because the larger the molecules are,

the more difficult they are
for us to detect.

This is humulone, the main molecule
that gives the bitterness in beer.

You can see it's quite a bit bigger
than all the other molecules

that we've been detecting so far.

And looking down on the bottom line there,

the 4 molecules of particular interest
I've shown you, we've got two of those,

but we don't yet have dimethyl sulfide

and we don't yet have
the buttered popcorn.

Now I want to impress on you

that it doesn't mean that none
of these molecules are out there in Space.

There's actually
really really good reasons

to assume that they are out in Space,

and it's just that we haven't
been able to detect them yet.

If you remember from this spectrum,
this is how we detect the molecules.

But the way that you match up these peaks

is you have to know the frequencies
for the molecules on Earth.

And the only way you can do that
is go up to the chemist's

and be really nice to them, and say,

"Study this molecule
very carefully in your lab,

then do some detailed calculations,

and then tell us exactly
which frequencies they are,

and then we're going
to look for them out in Space."

Out of all those molecules
that we're missing at the moment,

we have no information
on where their peaks are.

So they could well be
in a spectrum like this.

If you look really closely
at this spectrum,

you see there are indeed various places

where there are little peaks,
and we have no idea

which molecules
are responsible for them,

so it certainly could be molecules
that we're missing.

So, as I'm finishing up here,
I'd just like to take a step back.

We started off by asking
a very simple question:

can we make beer in Space?

Some people might consider
this a rather absurd question,

but what it does is it provides
a very nice demonstration

of how science works.

We've asked a very simple question,

and in the process of trying to
come up with an answer to that question,

we've managed to bring together
two apparently unrelated areas of science:

astronomy and chemistry.

Now I don't pretend

that the only pursuit for astrochemistry
is to find beer molecules in Space.

(Laughter)

But this question does provide
a relevant and tangible link

between these two subjects.

As I've shown you already,
astrochemistry is showing us

a rich complexity to the universe
that we never thought existed before.

And of course astrochemistry
brings us one step closer

to that ultimate, most noble of goals:
finding beer in Space.

(Laughter)

Thank you.

(Applause)